But life is this ever-changing thing, you know? You have to accept that. Everything is just a phase that’s passing through us. And we’re all just phases that are passing through the world. Things aren’t supposed to last forever. Not even tattoos.

Things started going sour with my dad around the time I was releasing my second album. The first album was like, obviously this major hit, and now everybody was just waiting to see what the second album was gonna be, and my dad had already sort of mapped it out—he already had a plan for it even before we dropped the first one—and he hadn’t really let me in on the plan, because he was just like: Focus on the shows. Focus on the interviews. Focus on the battle at hand. But then when it came time to start recording, he showed me what he was thinking and I was just like … Nah. That’s not it.

I mean, I could see what he was going for. The first album had been like, all about me being a kid, you know? It was this very pure, sort of really catchy and hot, but like, very innocent thing. The big single, “Be My Baby,” was all about me having a crush on this girl and like, writing her notes in class, but she never got the notes because somehow they’d always get intercepted by other kids along the way, and it was totally cute. Like, it wasn’t SO childish that adults couldn’t sing it or play it in the background while they were working out, but it wasn’t so adult that it felt like I was faking something. But now I was a teenager. Now I was living in a totally different reality. Now I was in L.A., and like … I wasn’t a virgin anymore, you know what I’m saying?

Think back to when you were fifteen, and try to remember how badly you just wanted to fuck somebody. Like, when you were fifteen, were you ever thinking about anything OTHER than fucking somebody? And it was probably really hard to make that happen, right? Because, like, what are you gonna do? I mean, sure, tons of kids these days are bumping by fifteen—twelve even—but I’m just saying, like, when you’re that age, all you want to do is just be an adult already, but you can’t, because you’re living with your parents, and you don’t have any of your own money, and you can’t go to bars or go to clubs or anything, and you’re just like, this horny, helpless, powerless little person.

But I was actually doing all those things that fifteen-year-olds dream about, and I was doing them when I was fifteen. I mean, I have a theory about this, and I think the problem with so many people—well, I guess I should just say men, because I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman—but the problem with so many men is that they have to wait until they’re like, thirty to live the life they dreamed of when they were fifteen. And that’s if they’re LUCKY, you know? But here I was, like, ACTUALLY fifteen years old, and I was living the fucking dream! I was partying, and going out to bars, and making my own millions, and fucking girls—Mandy and I were on a break at that point because she thought maybe she was a lesbian—and so I felt like an adult. For all intents and purposes, I WAS an adult. I mean, I was filing taxes—not by myself, but like, the taxes had my name on them—and so I was seeing the world and seeing myself way differently than I did when I was singing in the choir.